Quotes About Generations

Progress! Progress through everybody dying and their kids eventually not caring who their parents hated!

responsibility for our own. When you live by the memory of a single book, you are religious. When you live by the memory of several books, you are intellectual. When you live by the memory of several generations of people, you become a truly compassionate human being. But when you live beyond the memory of generations of people, you become a mystic.

we're at a crossroads, and the actions we take from this moment forward will have a defining impact on what kind of world we leave behind for future generations.

Give yourself a gift: the present moment. People out for posthumous fame forget that the Generations To Come will be the same annoying people they know now. And just as mortal. What does it matter to you if they say x about you, or think y?

The hands reaching in among the leaves and spines were once my mother's. I've passed them on. Decades ahead, you'll study your own temporary hands, and you'll remember. Don't cry, this is what happens.

Books and characters in books, pictures and elements in pictures—they all have families and ancestors, just like people.

For the ones who come after you, it will be easier. They will accept their duties with willing hearts. She did not say: Because they will have no memories, of any other way. She said: Because they won't want things they can't have.

Break the link in time between one generation and the next, and it's game over forever.

Mis dos abuelos estuvieron en la Primera Guerra Mundial, como médicos; el galés con el Ejército Indio en Galípoli y en Mesopotamia, y el canadiense en el frente occidental. Mi padre y mis cuatro tíos combatieron en la Segunda Guerra Mundial.

My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school.

Make up your mind to this. If you are different, you are isolated, not only from people of your own age but from those of your parents' generation and from your children's generation too. They'll never understand you and they'll be shocked no matter what you do. But your grandparents would probably be proud of you and say: 'There's a chip off the old block,' and your grandchildren will sigh enviously and say: 'What an old rip Grandma must have been!' and they'll try to be like you.

I'm sure your children won't approve of you, Scarlett, any more than Mrs. Merriwether and Mrs. Elsing and their broods approve of you now. Your children will probably be soft, prissy creatures, as the children of hard-bitten characters usually are. And to make them worse, you, like every other mother, are probably determined that they shall never know the hardships you've known. And that's all wrong. Hardships make or break people. So you'll have to wait for approval from your grandchildren.

Southerners have been known to stay over the Fourth and not get home before Thanksgiving. Some oldtimers take in overnight guests and keep them through three generations.

Do not raise your children the way your parents raised you; they were born for a different time.

Don't limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in another time.

What cannot be achieved in one lifetime will happen when one lifetime is joined to another.

You cannot correct an old person every time they say something offensive. You would never make it through Thanksgiving dinner!

Uncles and aunts, and cousins, are all very well, and fathers and mothers are not to be despised; but a grandmother, at holiday time, is worth them all.

Mans true taproots are nourished in the sequence of generations, and he loses his taproots in disrupted developmental time, not in abandoned localities.

It's a complicated relationship, being a good grandparent, because it hinges on a series of other relationships... Because being a grandparent is determined by the relationship your child has with you, partly determined by the one a son or daughter has with his or her spouse, partly determined by the relationship you have with the person your child has chosen to have a child with.

In Nanaville there is always in the back of my mind the understanding that I am building a memory out of spare parts and that, someday, that memory will be all that's left of me.

When I got older I realized that the majority of people in Miller's Valley were the most discontented kind of Americans, working people whose situations hadn't risen or fallen over generations, but who still carried a little bit of those streets-paved-with-gold illusions and so were always annoyed that the streets were paved with tar. If they were paved at all. Maybe

There are really only two commandments of Nanaville: love the grandchildren, and hold your tongue.

The reason we've made a mess of the planet is that being its stewards required us to imagine not our own futures but those four or five generations removed.